Meet Mark Minicozzi, the 31-year-old enjoying every second of big league camp

When ESPN’s cameras came to Scottsdale Stadium last week, Hunter Pence broke off a conversation with fellow former Phillie John Kruk and rushed into the clubhouse cafeteria. When Pence returned, he was with Mark Minicozzi, a 31-year-old infielder who can go passport stamp-for-passport stamp with Ryan Vogelsong.

Minicozzi started recapping his long, long, looooong journey to big league camp when Kruk interrupted.

“Wait,” he said. “Nicaragua? There’s a league in Nicaragua?”

Yes, there is. There’s a team in Worcester, Massachusetts, too. There’s a league in Winnipeg and one in Quebec. And Minicozzi has just about hit them all in search of reaching a lifelong dream.

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“Pretty much wherever I could go play, I would go play,” Minicozzi said. “I mean, Nicaragua is pretty out there, man.”

A 17th-round pick of the Giants in 2005, Minicozzi quietly slipped out of the minors after having Tommy John surgery in 2008. He showed up with an independent league team in Kansas City, then played in Winnipeg. In 2010 it was on to Worcester and Camden New Jersey, and in 2011 he was back in Worcester. Minicozzi had a .297/.361/.473 slash line at those random spots and averaged 12 homers a season, but he wasn’t on anybody’s radar. He couldn’t even see the radar.

Two years ago, Minicozzi was preparing for a return trip to Canada when he noticed that the Giants’ Double-A squad from Richmond was coming to Redding, Pennsylvania, near his home. He decided to pop in and say hello to Dave Machemer and Shane Turner, his former managers.

“What are you doing with your life after baseball?” Turner asked.

“I was like, ‘Oh, I’m actually still playing,'” Minicozzi said, laughing at the memory. Minicozzi told Turner that he hit .328 with 15 homers the previous season, and as the game was going on, Machemer walked over and asked the muscular infielder if he wanted to hit for the coaches the next day.

“I guess you could say I came straight out of the stands,” Minicozzi said. “Immediately I was like, ‘What time? I’ll be there!'”

Minicozzi hit a few balls in the cage at 7 a.m.. It must have been one hell of a session. Giants assistant general manager Bobby Evans called and said the Giants wanted him back. Evans asked Minicozzi when he could get to a minor league facility.

“I was like, ‘I’ll start running to Arizona right now,'” he said. “It was surreal, man. You’re playing all those years where every day you wake up and you’re like, man, I want that second chance, that second opportunity to play the game. Every kid growing up dreams of that first hit, that first at-bat.”

The story, improbably, gets better. Minicozzi was called up from minor league camp last March 22, just to give the Giants a little depth for a road game at Salt River Fields. That first hit, that first at-bat? An eighth-inning pinch-hit homer to right-center.

“It was surreal,” he said Friday, shaking his head.

The whole experience has been. When Minicozzi was playing in Nicaragua, games were scheduled around the eruptions of volcanoes in Chinandega since you couldn’t play through the gas that was released. To pass the time between independent league gigs, Minicozzi started a limo service, shuttling patients back and forth from cataract procedures.

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But he always has returned to baseball. At 31, he’s still giving it his all, despite the fact that the odds are heavily stacked against him. Minicozzi had a .400 on-base percentage last season and hit 10 homers and 30 doubles for Richmond, but he knows that you’re no longer a prospect when your age starts with a three. He played first, second, third and left for the Flying Squirrels, but there’s always another kid coming, another hot prospect who will be in the lineup regardless of his numbers.

The easy question, then, is why? Why has he run from volcanoes and played in a country that cares more about pee-wee hockey games than Major League Baseball?

“Why? Well, I’ve got a great family that supports me. But, really, it’s just love of the game, man,” he said. “If you don’t love it, you’d be gone a long time ago. I just had that hope and desire. Since I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was be a pro baseball player. I always told myself that if I keep working, keep putting in the hours and put in the time, that I can get an opportunity and I need to make the most of it.”

Minicozzi, who has come back from back, elbow, labrum and wrist surgeries, paused and pointed behind him, to a row of lockers with name tags for Tim Lincecum, Tim Hudson, Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner. They’re all All-Stars. They’ve all made millions. They will all be on the opening day roster.

Minicozzi will be on a minor league roster somewhere, still searching for that breakthrough. In Worcester, he played with Chris Colabello, who broke into the Majors with the Minnesota Twins last year just before his 30th birthday. So he’ll keep chasing the dream, and when he takes the field today, the story will get a little better. Minicozzi will be playing first base behind Bumgarner, hitting a few spots down the lineup from Buster Posey and Hunter Pence.

“To be here, I can’t even describe how awesome it is,” he said. “Every day I come to my locker at 6:45 a.m. and I can’t stop smiling. You know, I’ve been a lot of places where you’re not smiling.”

If there’s any GE regs at today’s game I’m in section 213, row K, seat 17. Life is good. Go Giants!

channelclemente

Lucky Pup! Bitcoin a beer.

ClutchUp

I’ll wave to you from Tower Road in San Mateo.

God bless guys like Minicozzi. Baseball exists and survives due to Veterans like Mark, like Bond, Brock Bond, Brian Dallimore and the Brian Bo-cocks, Randy Elliott. Plus it makes Walter Guest in Bang-cock happy when one of them makes the team like Bullet Ford or Justin (I’m a Marlin) Christian.

ClutchUp

Tremendous story (at least for me) Opie looks even more like Opie in that avatar. Is he country too/to/two?

Foothills Ryan

Texin.

ClutchUp

I’ll wave to you from Tower Road in San Mateo. God bless guys like Minicozzi. Baseball exists and survives due to Veterans like Mark, like Bond, Brock Bond, Brian Dallimore and the Brian Bo-cocks, Randy Elliott. Plus it makes Walter Guest in Bang-cock happy when one of them makes the team like Bullet Ford or Justin (I’m a Marlin) Christian.

Foothills Ryan

Shout outs to Walter Guest and Stickman in their respective far flung corners of tropics and ice storms.

The Oracle

Anyone else having a problem getting the audio with the MLB At Bat app?

Foothills Ryan

Meet Mark Minicozzi by the numbers:

In Richmond last year, Mark hit .309/.400/.445 with 10 HRs in 518 plate appearances. His BB% was 12.0 and his K% was 23.7. He had a BABIP of .403 and an ISO of .135. His RC+ of 138 suggests his offensive production was 38% over Easter League average.

For comparison, his teammate Andrew Susac put up the following numbers for Richmond:

How are your fruit trees as to bloom? Up here East of Sac, I’ve got a peach, damask plum, and apricot all in bloom simultaneously, whereas that bloom used to be scattered across 2 months or so. Yeah, the climate isn’t changing. Poor bees, poor trees.